[3 articles] A festival of books about Woodstock
http://www.newsday.com/a-festival-of-books-about-woodstock-1.1340789 August 6, 2009 By BILL BLEYER [email protected] Do aging baby boomers need a major nostalgia fix for the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Publishers must think so - they're bringing out a raft of new books on the world-famous music festival. OverviewsWOODSTOCK: Three Days That Rocked the World, edited by Mike Evans and Paul Kingsbury (Sterling, $35). A 288-page hardcover coffee-table volume that is the most comprehensive offering. WOODSTOCK: Peace, Music and Memories, by Brad Littleproud and Joanne Hague (Krause Publications, $24.99 paper). This 256-page trade paperback covers the entire festival, but its unique aspect is a guide to Woodstock memorabilia. Personal accountsTHE ROAD TO WOODSTOCK, by Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren (Ecco, $29.99). The festival, according to one of the event's promoters. Lang takes credit for aspects of the festival that others agree he had nothing to do with. THE PIED PIPER OF WOODSTOCK, by Artie Kornfeld (fall release from Spirit of Woodstock LLC, $30). Another of the festival promoters, who was also a successful music producer, describes the growth of the rock culture. But 120 of the 365 pages are about Woodstock. MAX B. YASGUR: The Woodstock Festival's Famous Farmer, by Sam Yasgur (Self-published later this month, $25; purchase details at syasgur @hvc.rr.com). A 300-page biography by his son with heavy emphasis on the festival. WOODSTOCK VISION: The Spirit of a Generation, by Elliott Landy (Backbeat, $35). Landy was the official festival photographer and most of the 224 pages showcase his work. Almost half the shots were taken at Woodstock. TAKING WOODSTOCK: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life, by Elliot Tiber with Tom Monte (Square One, $15.95 paper). Tiber is the person who lured the festival promoters to Bethel, and his account, reissued by the Garden City Park publisher, is the basis for the new Ang Lee movie of the same title. Oral historiesWOODSTOCK REVISITED: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving, Flashback-Inducing Stories from Those Who Were There, edited by Susan Reynolds (Adams Media, $12.95 paper). Enough said. odstock, by Pete Fornatale (Touchstone, $24.99). The DJ-music historian interviews festival artists and organizers. WOODSTOCK: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition, by Joel Makower (SUNY Press, $19.95 paper). The organizers tell their stories. ROOTS OF THE 1969 WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL: The Backstory to "Woodstock," by Weston Blelock and Julia Blelock (Woodstock Arts, $19.95 paper). Transcript of 2008 discussion about how musical "Sound-Outs" in town of Woodstock inspired the '69 event in Bethel. Musical focus BY THE TIME WE GOT TO WOODSTOCK, by Bruce Pollock (September release from Backbeat Books, $19.95 paper). Chronicles outdoor concerts that preceded and followed Woodstock. For children MAX SAID YES! The Woodstock Story, by Abigail Yasgur and Joseph Lipner with illustrations by Barbara Mendes (Change the Universe Press, $17.95). The 32 colorful pages explain the Woodstock aura to the next generation of flower children. -------- Woodstock books bring readers back to Yasgur's farm http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/story/1156008.html BY HOWARD COHEN [email protected] 07.26.09 The Road to Woodstock. Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren. Ecco/HarperCollins. 304 pages. $29.99. Back to the Garden. Pete Fornatale. Touchstone. 303 pages. $24.99. -- If you think the media saturation on Michael Jackson's death is outré, you should prepare for the gates of pop culture to burst in mid-August as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock arrives. Everyone who was there -- or thinks he was -- will tell of dropping acid for a ride with the Jefferson Airplane, skinny dipping in communal baths with 400,000 nubile neighbors and waking up to Jimi Hendrix strangling The Star Spangled Banner out of his electric guitar for the finalé of the three-day festival of music, mud and bad brown acid. New Yorker Michael Lang, who in the '60s owned a head shop in Coconut Grove and who created the Woodstock warmup Miami Pop Festival in May 1968, helped shape the Woodstock Music and Art Fair through persistence, charisma and Herculean organizational savvy. He proves to be a brilliant, amusing raconteur in The Road to Woodstock, in which he recounts how the festival came together. The book's detail-laden flashbacks from organizers and performers such as hippie goddess Melanie, a newcomer who had no idea what she was getting into; a cranky Pete Townshend, who blasts ``the people at Woodstock'' as ``a bunch of hypocrites;'' and a bemused Grace Slick who recalls singing ``sort of half asleep,'' are potent enough to give readers a contact high. Reading Lang's book can be a heady experience. He recounts vivid tales of the early days in the Grove -- which he describes as ``an artsy laid-back vibe, the kind of place where dogs lie down and sleep in the middle of the road.'' Lang and his pals spent a lot of time outwitting cops (some corrupt, others of the Keystone variety). One planned bust of a pot party went hilariously awry as a tipster alerted Lang and his cronies to the coming arrests, and word spread along the Grove grapevine: ``As a line of police cars raced through the Grove in one direction, an equal number of long-haired cyclists would whiz past them, going the opposite way.'' As the leader of a rag-tag group who had never staged anything of the magnitude of Woodstock, Lang steadfastly believed in his vision even as fate conspired against him. Woodstock wasn't even in Woodstock, N.Y. The location fell through at the last minute, and as Lang recounts, producers had to go to nearby Sullivan County. They found a large field owned by amiable dairy farmer Max Yasgur, who apparently was someone over 30 whom hippies could trust. Lang also proves a brisk storyteller in the later chapters, which describe such career-making performances as those by newcomer Santana and Sly & the Family Stone. ``I got to witness the peak of the festival, which was Sly Stone. I don't think he ever played that good again -- steam was literally coming out of his Afro,'' guitarist Carlos Santana recalls. However, not every act rose out of the muck. The Grateful Dead had problems. ``A combination of the weather and hallucinogenics proved their undoing,'' Lang writes. But chunks in the middle of Road feel an interminable slog -- like the traffic jams that led to the field at Yasgur's farm -- to anyone uninterested in spread sheets and the headaches with which concert promoters deal. Perhaps this was Lang's unintended way of making the reader feel as he did 40 years ago: For every one giddy step forward, there's a corresponding and frustrating step back. Pete Fornatale's Back to the Garden -- titled after a line in Joni Mitchell's Woodstock -- lacks the peaks and valleys and import of Lang's book. After all, Fornatale, a veteran New York radio personality, merely reported on the event. He relies on about 110 sources -- some living (David Crosby, Paul Kantner) and others dead (Jerry Garcia, Abbie Hoffman) to take readers back to Yasgur's farm in Bethel ``when the s - - - hit the fan (or, in some cases, when the fans hit the s - - -''). Fornatale's belief is that ``you didn't have to be at Woodstock to be at Woodstock,'' and his mighty task here is to weave the recollections to prove that paradox. Back to the Garden is a brisker read than Road to Woodstock as it lacks the minutia that sometimes makes the reader's eyes glaze in Lang's book. And Fornatale's conversational style and the assortment of characters he quotes make for a lively read. Some have fond stories. Original Sha Na Na guitarist Henry Gross, who later had a '70s solo hit about a missing dog (Shannon), tells of drinking with Hendrix, who had also performed at Lang's Miami Pop Festival. Others were less than enchanted with the shows: Concertgoer Jim Marion tells of leaving the rain-drenched festival early because it wasn't all that. Marion would have a considerably better time going back to the garden with these books as guides. -------- The Road To Woodstock http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2009/07/25/the-road-to-woodstock/ One of Woodstock's creators looks back on the festival's 40th anniversary. By Norman Weinstein July 25, 2009 The 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival has brought with it a bounty of books from those who organized it, attended it, wished they hadn't attended it, or missed it altogether. If your local bookstore resembles mine, a display table of Woodstock memorabilia, including DVDs, coffee mugs, and posters, competes for space with eight new books on Woodstock published within the last few months. Even for those like myself who actually remember trekking the long and winding road to the festival, this dizzying display of marketing "peace and love" can seem bewildering. But then again, Woodstock itself was confusing. Without even counting the reunions (concerts repeated in 1994 and 1999 under the moniker of "Woodstock"), it's unclear whether the original 1969 event was really a single happening. Or was it instead, simultaneously, a rock music festival, a countercultural party, a political protest, a free-love carnival, a psychedelic drug expo, the world's largest improvised town meeting or something more? Purporting to sort it all out for us is The Road To Woodstock, the memoir (as told to and transcribed by Holly George-Warren) of Michael Lang, one of the 1969 Woodstock festival's cocreators. The jacket copy of "The Road to Woodstock" calls Lang "the man who started it all." Some of Lang's partners might take issue with that claim. But publishers' marketing copy aside, Lang does reveal himself in "The Road to Woodstock" as an extraordinarily convincing capitalist of a particular flavor. Relying on direct quotes from many of the key Woodstock organizers as well as musicians and their managers, a portrait emerges of Lang as an extraordinary trickster, a character as large and charming as Melville's "Confidence-Man." Miriam Yasgur, wife of Max Yasgur, whose farm made the event possible, sketches this portrait of Lang: "It takes Michael about fifteen or twenty minutes to charm you, and having spoken to him for a while, he really put us at ease. He explained the way it was going to be, and he made it sound like everything was going to be so simple and not anything that big. He has a way of ingratiating himself I think he's a born con man. Even though you know you're being 'had,' you can't help but like him." Lang presents himself, however, as the loftiest of idealists: "For me, Woodstock was a test of whether people of our generation really believed in one another and the world we were struggling to create." At least that's how he opens his memoir. The shift from the generational "we" to "I" follows soon. Lang tells of his early success as an entrepreneur running a shop selling countercultural paraphernalia (pipes, papers, posters) that evolved into producing successful outdoor concerts with big-name rock bands in the Coconut Grove, Fla., area. Any number of potentially dangerous disorderly situations were apparently defused by Lang's unflappable nature and his cool demeanor, characteristics that served him well at the Woodstock festival. Although clearly a great music fan, Lang explains few of the reasons for his musical predilections and devotions. He fast-forwards his narrative as he moves from Florida to Woodstock, an small, upstate, New York town with a long bohemian history. Lang's timing for his move was astute. Woodstock was in the process of reconstituting itself as a haven for highly accomplished rock innovators like Bob Dylan, The Band, and Jimi Hendrix. There he met Artie Kornfeld, head of A&R at Capitol Records, a kind of hip capitalist not unlike Lang, but with considerably more money and connections in the music industry. The two formed a friendship with young venture capitalists Joel Rosenman and John Roberts. These four became the nucleus of the leadership that made the Woodstock festival a reality. (Ironically the festival was actually held a 40-minute drive from Woodstock in Bethel, N.Y.) Lang's account of the three-day event does suggest that he was the "mastermind and creative genius" who faced all the unforeseen events associated with Woodstock (countless bad drug trips among the half-million crowd, lack of food and sanitation, etc.) and kept everything working. Whether you believe this or not, Lang's relationship with his three key partners has been contested in print and through the media in the years following Woodstock. If you crave more information about Woodstock after reading Lang's book (and you probably will), I would recommend Pete Fornatale's "Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock." The book offers what Fornatale cleverly identifies as "the Rashoman effect" (named for a Japanese film where a crime is described through a dozen different narrators), a very broad spectrum of completely different, even contradictory perspectives on Woodstock, offered by organizers, performers, and attendants. Whatever the Woodstock festival meant, it was too capacious for even the trickiest mastermind to narrate fairly on his own. -- Norman Weinstein, who writes about arts and culture for the Monitor, is the author of a forthcoming biography of Carlos Santana. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
